For what it's worth, I started messing with HTML in elementary school, but had no idea how simple HTTP/1.0 was until I hit the 400 level classes in college. Edi

For what it's worth, I started messing with HTML in elementary school, but had no idea how simple HTTP/1.0 was until I hit the 400 level classes in college. Editing in Notepad was the only way to go back then: even Dreamweaver got too complicated. Likewise, my first foray into JMS/message-queue type stuff was with STOMP, the simple text-oriented message protocol: there was no way I was going to understand the 'open wire protocol' for ActiveMQ. Ain't got time for that! All that said, I think peterwwillis is right: http/X.0, as long as it's well-simplified, is better in binary than it is in text. Ideally, there's a bijection between your text-mode and binary-mode (like a lens), where it's easy to parse (rely on your toolset to do the translation back and forth) and easy to put on the wire. Forth is a good example of how to do it sanely.